It is a convenient coincidence that a number of interesting articles about different aspects of gaming and gaming culture have surfaced in time for the last week of my intersession course.
- Develop magazine recounts the stories of the ten biggest flops as games in the past decade – the reasons behind the failures are the most interesting part
- MSNBC reports that the size of certain portions of your brain predicts your ability at playing video games – an odd claim given that “video game” is a very broad category and I don’t tend to think that there is a single set of skills that lead to success in all games, which is consistent with some of the details buried later in the article
- In good news for my students, learning how to create computer games can improve other student skills and can be effective in broadening interest in computing
- On the down side, they may find themselves at reduced risk for rickets if they play too much
- One game player muses on how to compute the value of a game based on a combination of cost, enjoyment and time spent playing it – seems to me there might need to be an exponential in there somewhere
- Besides describing a neat Project Natal game, 2 Finger Heroes, that is on the scrap heap, this article alludes to the problem of localization in games, in this case that gestures do not always translate across cultures
- Finally, if you think the life of a game developer seems like fun and games, take a look at this open letter from wives of Rockstar employees protesting their work situation – though be aware this is just one person’s presentation of the situation; there is also an interesting implied gender to the developers at Rockstar in the letter
“my intersession course?”
At least I talk about the class in the plural…
You should read “my” in the sense of “faculty are obliged to teach an intersession course and this is mine”, not “faculty like to eat brownies, and this one is mine”.